William Morris
Duke University, NC·Ecology & Evolution
How will changing climates and disturbances like fire alter where plant species live and how many individuals survive? Most forecasts predict only where a species can occur, not how abundant it will be.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Plant Science & Agriculture
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
plant population ecology
demography
integral projection models
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Build and validate a climate- and fire-driven integral projection model for Venus flytraps, using demographic data from near-factorial manipulations of fire frequency, drought, and warming across longleaf pine savannas.
- Test whether Venus flytraps serve as an indicator species, meaning their response to fire and climate accurately predicts changes in other species' abundance, to guide prescribed-burn planning.
- Define rare climate events and measure their demographic effects on Silene acaulis and Polygonum viviparum, using long-term monitoring of 29 populations from New Mexico to arctic Alaska.
- Measure local adaptation to climate and its demographic causes using common garden transplants followed for nine years and controlled thermal performance experiments on two tundra plant species.
- Forecast range-wide distribution and abundance using density-dependent demographic models driven by environmental data, first validated by present-casting current patterns at new sites.
- Determine how demographic buffering and adaptive demographic lability arise from responses to specific climate and biotic drivers, by synthesizing up to 29 years of data from 40 tundra plant populations.
- Test whether differing demographic responses among individuals, populations, and regions reduce year-to-year swings in population growth and help species persist across their ranges.
More about the research
They are also complicated by large year-to-year swings in weather and by populations adapted to their own local conditions. Across three collaborative projects, this research tracks the survival, growth, and reproduction of individual plants over many years and sites. It then builds population models that turn these vital rates into predictions of abundance, persistence, and range shifts.
Why it matters
Land managers in the southeastern U.S. could use the prescribed-burn recommendations and web tool to protect longleaf pine savannas. These savannas are home to threatened species such as the Venus flytrap and red-cockaded woodpecker. More broadly, the long-term tundra work aims to forecast changes in species abundance and range under climate change. It will also produce tested methods and public datasets that others could apply to many species when planning for ecosystem health.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: LTREB Renewal: How will local adaptation and climatic extremes shape continental-scale changes in distribution and abundance under climate change?
NSF · Aug 2024 – Jul 2029
Collaborative Research: Adapting disturbance management to future climate in a fire-prone ecosystem: does response of an at-risk species indicate biodiversity effects?
NSF · Jan 2025 – Dec 2027
Collaborative Research: OPUS: Synthesizing multi-decadal and multi-site data to promote understanding of key questions in stochastic demography
NSF · Aug 2024 – Jul 2027
Closest labs
William Petry
North Carolina State University, NC·Ecology & Evolution
Experimentally amplify natural year-to-year variation in pollination for thousands of tagged perennial plants of two species, using increased, reduced and unmanipulated pollination treatments in a long-term field experiment.
Diane Thomson
Scripps College, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Quantify correlations among weather metrics and test whether they are changing over time, using 17–27-year demographic records of six California Channel Islands plant species and one mainland species.
Thomas Miller
Rice University, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether Epichloë fungi are most beneficial to host grasses in stressful years, using 15–20 years of demographic data from a symbiont-removal experiment across seven grass species.
The school
Duke University: 61 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 417 research doctorates a year.
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